Sean O'Hara asked Joe Hill:

You've said a few times that you don't consider The Fireman to be a horror novel, though a lot of people disagree. Do you see genre as a constraint?

Joe Hill I see genre as a set of props that you can bring in to stage the performance. In the horror prop room there's the axe, strobes for suggesting the flash of lightning, plastic gallon jugs of fake blood. In the science fiction prop room, you've got the robot costume and a drawer full of Buck Rogers zap guns. And so on. If you use those props, you're inevitably going to encourage certain expectations in your audience, which you can seek to meet or confound, depending on your goals.

If I'm not sure The Fireman is really horror, it's probably because I got most of my props from the science fiction department, with a couple side trips to to the room where we store stuff for romantic comedies. I also visited the wardrobe we use for "road trip" stories. Oh, and also, I grabbed a carpetbag left over from the theater's last performance of Mary Poppins. Ahem.

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MJ Codename: ♕Duchess♕ I like the creepiness of it and how it really breaks human beings down to their primal versions of themselves, but man, Harper is awful.
Sep 12, 2017 11:39AM · flag

Erica Throne When we talked about Horror in my genre fiction class at university, one of the defining elements of the genre was death; a main character, often the ...more
Jun 09, 2019 11:47PM · flag